IHT forms an important branch of an emerging new discipline called Adaptive Medicine. The Russian Academy of Medical Sciences has a Department of Adaptive Medicine, one of its aims being to look at the therapeutic potential of IHT. An International Academy of Adaptive Medicine was formed in 1990 by an interdisciplinary group of scientists and clinicians from many countries including Japan, Australia, Germany and the USA. Its aim is to develop further understanding and share information about the ways in which the adaptive process enables the body to respond to different stress stimuli, with a view to treating and preventing different diseases.
The scientific definition of stress as given by Dr Hans Selye, one of the first researchers to really study stress in the laboratory, is: “A stressor is anything that challenges an organism to adapt.” In this context, heat, cold, physical exercise, electrical stress, lack of food, hypoxia of altitude and even emotional or psychological turmoil are stress factors that can be used to strengthen us if we experience them in amounts we can tolerate and to which we can adapt.